The emerging paradigm of Web 2.0 is transforming the traditional internet from a mass media to a social media mode. The fundamental communication premise in social to media mode is one-to-one communication. Hence, technologies enabling such communication paradigms are gaining prominence. However, text or data has been the primary mode of communication in the majority of existing portals. Historically, voice has proved to be the most successful medium for one-to-one communications. However, existing Web 2.0 applications are missing an important medium of communication, and would greatly benefit from an effort made towards enabling them with this mode of communication.
Existing approaches for bringing voice communication capabilities to web applications can include, for example, the following Initially, SS7-based intelligent networking (IN) services were integrated with internet applications and several smart services (such as, for example, click-to-dial and interactive voice response (IVR)-based applications) were developed. The subsequent emergence of voice over internet protocol (VoIP) technology with session initiation protocol (SIP) as the out-of-band signaling protocol enabled these services to be available in the internet protocol (IP) domain. This, in turn, facilitated development of advanced applications beyond the basic click-to-dial, where it was possible to provide the call-control to the application developers.
Although SIP provides flexibility, VoIP applications alone cannot leverage the full benefits that a cellular operator offers (for example, mobility, quality of service (QoS), billing etc.), which makes them indispensable in building advanced services. In fact, it is a non-trivial issue to make these services available to application developers The IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) was designed to address this issue. IMS provides assistance and control for multimedia sessions established between two communicating peers.
IMS defines a functional element called the application server (AS) in its service architecture to provide value-added services. The AS represents capabilities, which are system components used presumably with other components (for example, content servers) to implement a service to the user. For example, SIP is the IMS service control (ISC) interface used between the core network call session control function (CSCF) and the service capabilities implemented in the AS.
However, a problem in the standardization lies in the interaction of these capabilities. The 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) standard only loosely defines the functional element called the service capability interaction manager (SCIM) that handles the interaction between several capabilities. The implementation details are left to the vendors. SCIM, however, was never designed to bring the IMS capabilities to the mashup domain. For example, in a mashup environment, SCIM needs to handle protocol level mediation between SIP and SOAP to merge the capabilities from two disparate domains of web and/or service-oriented architecture (SOA) services and IMS. To be effective, telecom communication services should be customizable at run-time based on various types of contextual information. As such, there is a need for an enhanced SCIM (e-SCIM) and an architectural solution that implements the e-SCIM functionalities.
Existing approaches include, for example, a web based service creation environment that enables users to statically configure telecom service logic and scripts call logic using a web interface. However, such an approach does not consider the mashup capability defined in the Web 2.0 paradigm, and does not cover the run-time configuration, execution and rule-based mediation of telecom services with dynamic contexts generated during the run-time.
Other existing approaches can include, for example, routing a communication flow based on a dynamic context, and the representation of a response generated by a server in a client machine based on the dynamic context of the latter. But, however, such approaches do not deal with run-time configuration, mashup and rule-based execution of telecom services (for example, call notification services).
Additionally, existing approaches can include the selection of web services by a service provider based on several dynamic run-time parameters, software architecture for selection, configuration and composition of software based services, and a servlet based architecture for selection, configuration and composition of services using user inputs. However, such approaches do not deal with the rule-based run-time execution and mediation of telecom services and the user oriented dynamic context generation and selection of services.
Other existing approaches also do not, for example, perform rule-based run-time mediation of telecom services, not do existing approaches cover the configuration of component services with dynamic contexts and the subsequent rule-based run-time mediation of services during execution.
The emerging Web 2.0 marketplace presents an important opportunity for telecom operators to sell their own capabilities and content as services. Operators have a wealth of content associated with their network as well as core network enable is (for example, call control, presence and messaging) that could serve as potential new revenue streams in a Web 2.0 world. Moreover, there is an increasing need for operators to make both core and value-added functions reusable and mashable. To this end, operators are gradually embracing the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) and looking at developing the next-generation of SIP-based applications that can be mashed up in innovative ways.
However, to do so, IMS/SIP-based services need to be empowered with the necessary coordination capabilities required in a mashup environment. This, in turn, implies protocol-level control to be tendered to the mashup developer, an issue that has not been sufficiently addressed by existing approaches. As such, there exists a need for middleware support in facilitating the coordination of telecom mashups, as well an architecture that provides the necessary run-time control and mediation in an IMS-based operator network.
Existing web based communication services are assigned to a static context and are not configurable, controllable nor compose-able by end users on demand. Hence a solution is required to enable on-demand selection, configuration, and composition of communication services, with dynamic context of communicating agents, enabled in a Web 2.0 paradigm.